As anxiety grows about Greece and the future of the eurozone, the debate in Ireland is shaking out all sorts of truths.

Even the governor of the central bank, Patrick Honohan, admitted the debt in Ireland could be crippling and said if economic growth isn't achieved quickly enough, Ireland will have to seek new "risk-sharing arrangements" with Europe.

This admission has barely been noticed as the focus of the debate centred much more on the scathing personal attack on Honohan, who Kelly singled out for making "the costliest mistake ever made by an Irish person" when he underestimated the banks' losses last year.

I will return to Honohan, but just to give a flavour of Kelly's devastating masterpiece, he rounded on just about everybody from the IMF, to the EU, the US, Irish negotiators and the Irish government. All of this was peppered with some fabulous one liners including the description of former heads of the AIB and Bank of Ireland as "faintly dim former rugby players".

Irish negotiators 'suffered Stockholm Syndrome'

In the lengthy, article, Kelly said Irish negotiators in Europe were "displaying strong elements of Stockholm Syndrome" for accepting the ECB's position that bank bondholders should be paid back in full and that the sole purpose of the Irish bailout was "to frighten the Spanish into line".

He said Irish negotiators were "spineless", and he was strongly critical of new government policy, which he describes as "lying on the ground with a begging bowl and hoping that someone takes pity on us".

He heaped praise on George Osborne who, he says, was the only one to speak up for the Irish during bailout negotiations and says the IMF were out-manoeuvred by the ECB and handed over €30bn (£26bn) in a deal "that negotiators privately admit will end up in Irish bankruptcy".

He said the EU forced an economic collapse on Ireland because of a "potentially, fatal flaw in the design of the eurozone: the lack of any means of dealing with large insolvent banks".

Honohan rejected Kelly's claims robustly on RTE yesterday and said the government guarantee that puts the taxpayer on the hook for bank debt would have been made whether the central bank knew the full extent of the banks' losses or not.

"The fact we did not have final numbers did not affect the decision on honouring the guarantee at all, the guarantee would have been honoured even if the numbers we look at now ... if those numbers were there, the same action would have been taken," he said.Honohan: growth of debt is serious problem

More interesting however in Honohan's interview yesterday (podcast here) was an admission that the bailout may not work and that the bailout figures were predicated on a return to strong economic growth. With forecasts for GDP growth already cut by the government and outside credit ratings agencies, this is looking optimistic.

"If things do not go well in terms of economic growth, it will be much more difficult and this is a point I've made repeatedly – in that case, there will be a problem and in order to cope with that situation we need to think of better financial arrangements with Europe.

"We need to think of risk-sharing arrangements that would ensure that the growth will come right and the overhang of debt, which I have stressed many times (Not just Morgan notices we have a lot of debt, heavy debt) and the growth of that debt is a serious problem and needs to be managed in discussion and in negotiation with our European partners."

Kelly isn't the first economist to say Ireland's debt is unsustainable and will bankrupt the country. Economist Stephen Kinsella has said this several times as guest writer on this blog. David McWilliams and Goodbody stockbrokers' Dermot O'Leary are also of this view and indeed former IMF director Donal Donovan said as much in London a month ago and predicted Ireland would get as much as a third of its debt restructured.

But Kelly is a must-read and his utterances reach a higher plane than others, largely because he got it right predicting the property crash (something for which he was vilified) and because he so rarely says anything in public.

All eyes will now be on Greece and there is a feeling in Ireland that at last the ECB is being forced to tackle the debts in the peripheral countries. If Greece cuts a new deal by playing hard ball, it will be a gift to the Irish government which should throw away the begging bowl and go on the offensive.